The present invention relates generally to computers and communications and more particularly to a software method and system providing data interlinks between front end users and back end storage pools.
It is quite common that hardware of various models from different vendors and manufactures are present in the same storage network due to the diversified storage market and technology. This heterogeneousness makes the administration and management of the storage network very complex. Access conflicts and resource competition among the front-end users is thus becoming inevitable.
To solve these problems, the prior art provides generally a virtualization technique and introduces a virtual engine at the storage end to manage all front-end users. With reference to FIG. 1, the front end users are connected to the virtual engine through servers 102 and the virtual engine 104 manages the disk arrays inside the storage hardware 106. The virtual engine comprises logical units and a unified virtual layer. The unified virtual layer is the abstraction of the disk arrays, which reflects the access requests from front end users to the disk arrays; the logical units face toward the front-end users and examine the “legitimacy” of the access request from the front-end users. The logical units share such access requests so that the goal of reducing access conflicts and resource competition can be accomplished.
A storage pool or hardware device is thus abstracted into multiple logical units. One storage hardware device can link to several front-end users, while one front-end user may access multiple storage hardware devices. Such inter-access or interlinks between the storage hardware devices and front-end users will become more and more complex when the number of storage hardware devices and front-end users becomes bigger and bigger. The system administrator has to maintain, manually, each interlink between the back-end storage and the front-end user or server. The burden will eventually become too heavy to bear and human error or mistake will unfortunately become inevitable.